Consider to improve the default blocking autoplay policy
Categories
(Core :: Audio/Video, enhancement, P3)
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(Reporter: alwu, Assigned: alwu)
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Details
Currently default blocking autoplay policy is sticky gesture activation, which would only block autoplay before the page gets activated.
However, there are many websites using same document for the navigation, which means when users click a link on the homepage, this policy would not block the autoplay on the subpage which users navigate to. This cases sometimes is expected, (eg. on media sites, where users click to subpage and want to watch media immediately), sometime is not (eg. on news websites, where users are tend to read articles, not a media)
Chrome uses their media engagement index to prevent news sites from autoplay, but that is not transparent (because users can't adjust that index) and might still not fit for every users.
In this bug, I would like to discuss if there is any better way which we could improve on our default policy, instead of simply relying on the sticky user gesture activation.
The most annoying site for me is Yahoo! Finance:
- I have set default as "Block audio"
- I have added a setting to "Block both" on finance.yahoo.com.
- I have changed policy to "click-to-play".
Before click-to-play, the video would still load just by scrolling or changing tabs back and forth. Now it works, but I think this should be the default when adding a specific site preference to block both. (This way sites that use video as background can still work)
Still, after interacting with the video and pausing it again, the scroll/tab focus behavior turns the video on again automatically. This is very annoying and slows down the other sites.
The only way this has worked for me - for a long while now - is to explicitly turn on audio on the player controls, as soon as the site loads or I don't want video anymore. With audio off, blocking or click-to-play seem to not work at all.
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